The Next 20 Years Are Going To Make The Last 20 Look Like We Accomplished Nothing In Tech

The world is hitting its stride in technological advances, and
futurists have been making wild-sounding bets on what we'll
accomplish in the not-so-distant future.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil, for example, believes that by 2040
artificial intelligence will be so good that humans will be fully
immersed in virtual reality and that something called the
Singularity, when technology becomes so advanced that it changes
the human race irreversibly, will occur.

Kevin Kelly, who helped launch Wired in 1993, sat down for an
hour-long video interview with John
Brockman at Edge. Kelly believes the next 20 years in
technology will be radical. So much so that he believes our
technological advances will make the previous 20 years "pale" in
comparison.

"If we were sent back with a time machine, even 20 years,
and reported to people what we have right now and describe what
we were going to get in this device in our pocket — we'd have
this free encyclopedia, and we'd have street maps to most of the
cities of the world, and we'd have box scores in real time and
stock quotes and weather reports, PDFs for every manual in the
world ... You would simply be declared insane," Kelly
said.

"But the next 20 years are going to make this last 20
years just pale," he continued. "We're just at the beginning of
the beginning of all these kind of changes. There's a sense that
all the big things have happened, but relatively speaking,
nothing big has happened yet. In 20 years from now we'll look
back and say, 'Well, nothing really happened in the last 20
years.'"

In 20 years from now we'll look back and say, 'Well, nothing
really happened in the last 20 years.'

"Certainly most of the things that are going to be produced
are going to be made by robots and automation, but [humans] can
modify them and we can change them, and we can be involved in the
co-production of them to a degree that we couldn't in the
industrial age," Kelly says.

"That's sort of the promise of 3D printing and
robotics and all these other high-tech material sciences is that
it's going to become as malleable."

Tracking and surveillance are only going to get more
prevalent, but they may move toward "coveillance" so that we can
control who's monitoring us and what they're monitoring.

"It's going to be very, very difficult to prevent this thing that
we're on all the time 24 hours, seven days a week, from tracking,
because all the technologies — from sensors to quantification,
digitization, communication, wireless connection — want to track,
and so the internet is going to track," says Kelly.

"We're going to track ourselves. We're going to track each other.
Government and corporations are going to track us. We can't
really get out of that. What we can try and do is civilize and
make a convivial kind of tracking."

Kelly says the solution may be to let people see who's tracking
them, what they're tracking, and give them the ability to correct
trackings that are inaccurate. Right now, people just feel like
they're being spied on, and they can't control who's watching
them or what information is being surfaced.

Everything really will be about "big data."

Kelly admits that big data is a buzzword, but he thinks it
deserves to be.

"We're in the period now where the huge dimensions of data and
their variables in real time needed for capturing, moving,
processing, enhancing, managing, and rearranging it, are becoming
the fundamental elements for making wealth," says Kelly.

"We used to rearrange atoms, now it's all about rearranging data.
That is really what we’ll see in the next 10 years
... They're going to release data from language to
make it machine-readable and recombine it in an infinite number
of ways that we're not even thinking about."

Asking the right questions will become more valuable than
finding answers.

In the age of Google and Wikipedia, answers to endless questions
are free. Kelly believes that asking good questions will become
much more important in the future than finding one-off solutions.

"Every time we use science to try to answer a question, to
give us some insight, invariably that insight or answer provokes
two or three other new questions," he says. "While science
is certainly increasing knowledge, it's actually increasing our
ignorance even faster."

"In a certain sense what
becomes really valuable in a world running under Google's reign
are great questions, and that means that for a long time humans
will be better at than machines. Machines are for answers. Humans are for
questions."